Matt R. Erickson
2014
Proponents of a legal tender paper currency occasionally point to the Constitution’s wording of the power “To coin Money” and claim that the word “Money” must include paper currency, since ‘money’ appears to be a word of greater meaning than that used in the same clause as it relates to “foreign Coin.” This is but a slight variation of the same argument which compares this power “To coin Money” in the Constitution with the wording used in the Ninth of the earlier Articles of Confederation (the articles under which the United States were joined together in common union before the Constitution was ratified), which stated, in part: “The United States in Congress assembled shall also have the sole and exclusive right and power of regulating the alloy and value of coin struck by their own authority, or by that of respective states…” These proponents of paper money correctly point out that no foreign paper currency can be made current as American money since only “foreign Coin” is specified and also that “regulating the alloy and value of coin struck” obviously restricts that older authority to ‘coin’ which could be ‘struck’ with an ‘alloy’ and given (objective) ‘value’. Paper money advocates of course then point to the Constitution’s more generic phrase “To coin Money” to argue that the Constitution must allow Congress greater power over money — including the power to emit a paper currency — since the Constitution mentions nothing of alloy, and since paper currencies are commonly and casually considered ‘money’. An important refutation of this argument comes from the very court cases themselves which upheld the power of Congress to issue a legal tender paper currency. Here the Supreme Court repeatedly denied that this power to issue legal tender paper currencies had anything whatsoever to do with the coining of money or with the regulating of its value (stating among other things, that such topic was “foreign to the subject before us”). In refutation of these false claim
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